This application is related to United States Patent Applications entitled A SYSTEM, METHOD AND ARTICLE OF MANUFACTURE FOR A DEVELOPMENT ARCHITECTURE FRAMEWORK and A SYSTEM, METHOD AND ARTICLE OF MANUFACTURE FOR MAINTENANCE AND ADMINISTRATION IN AN E-COMMERCE APPLICATION FRAMEWORK, both of which are filed concurrently herewith and which are incorporated by reference in their entirety.
The present invention relates to software patterns and more particularly to an abstraction factory pattern.
An important use of computers is the transfer of information over a network. Currently, the largest computer network in existence is the Internet. The Internet is a worldwide interconnection of computer networks that communicate using a common protocol. Millions of computers, from low end personal computers to high-end super computers are coupled to the Internet.
The Internet grew out of work funded in the 1960s by the U.S. Defense Department""s Advanced Research Projects Agency. For a long time, Internet was used by researchers in universities and national laboratories to share information. As the existence of the Internet became more widely known, many users outside of the academic/research community (e.g., employees of large corporations) started to use Internet to carry electronic mail.
In 1989, a new type of information system known as the World-Wide-Web (xe2x80x9cthe Webxe2x80x9d) was introduced to the Internet. Early development of the Web took place at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. The Web is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval system aimed to give wide access to a large universe of documents. At that time, the Web was known to and used by the academic/research community only. There was no easily available tool which allows a technically untrained person to access the Web.
In 1993, researchers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released a Web browser called xe2x80x9cMosaicxe2x80x9d that implemented a graphical user interface (GUI). Mosaic""s graphical user interface was simple to learn yet powerful. The Mosaic browser allows a user to retrieve documents from the World-Wide-Web using simple point-and-click commands. Because the user does not have to be technically trained and the browser is pleasant to use, it has the potential of opening up the Internet to the masses.
The architecture of the Web follows a conventional client-server model. The terms xe2x80x9cclientxe2x80x9d and xe2x80x9cserverxe2x80x9d are used to refer to a computer""s general role as a requester of data (the client) or provider of data (the server). Under the Web environment, Web browsers reside in clients and Web documents reside in servers. Web clients and Web servers communicate using a protocol called xe2x80x9cHyperText Transfer Protocolxe2x80x9d (HTTP). A browser opens a connection to a server and initiates a request for a document. The server delivers the requested document, typically in the form of a text document coded in a standard Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) format, and when the connection is closed in the above interaction, the server serves a passive role, i.e., it accepts commands from the client and cannot request the client to perform any action.
The communication model under the conventional Web environment provides a very limited level of interaction between clients and servers. In many systems, increasing the level of interaction between components in the systems often makes the systems more robust, but increasing the interaction increases the complexity of the interaction and typically slows the rate of the interaction. Thus, the conventional Web environment provides less complex, faster interactions because of the Web""s level of interaction between clients and servers.
A system and method provide an abstraction factory pattern in a client/server architecture. Data is received and transformed into a Data is received and transformed into a plurality of concrete objects. Each of the concrete objects is associated with an abstract interface. A map of the association between the concrete objects and the abstract interface is created. When a request is received from the client that includes an identifier for one of the concrete objects and an identifier for the abstract interface, the map on the server is consulted to locate the concrete object that has been identified. An abstract object is then created that corresponds to the located concrete object such that the abstract object serves as a handle, generically manipulable by the client/server architecture. The invention represents a way to encapsulate diversity such that only those parts of the system that need to understand the difference between two objects have to deal with those differences.
In one embodiment of the present invention, the located concrete object may also be inserted into the abstract object.
In an aspect of the present invention, the identifiers may be included with a single request. In another aspect of the present invention, the abstraction factory pattern may be written in a C++ programming language.